Every single videos I upload goes blurry on youtube but the original video is really sharp and looks good. I tried different settings to render in Sony Vegas but none of them is working. I searched but couldn't find any solutions. Is there something I'm missing ? Any help is appreciated

Well the problem with youtube is that it has to re-encode to fit into certain standard bitrate and parameters to be streaming compatible. This means that quality will get worse no matter what. If the video you upload is too sharp and detailed, then it's going to be worse because it has to cut even more to have it fit within its limits, so my suggestion is to actually try to apply a slight blur (a denoise or actually a lowpass filter would be better, but a blur is easier to do) for the youtube-friendly encode, which will make the quantizer of youtube's encode happier with your input and the quality should be somewhat more preserved, since you're basically making your video require less bitrate. You only need to do that for streaming purposes though (and only if the video is especially bitrate needy), do keep the distro copy with its original quality.

Well, uploading as 720p should be mostly fine. I'm not sure what else to suggest. Make sure you are exporting in a lossless format from vegas and encoding as a low crf (14 or so) in zarx264gui and upload that to youtube.If the results are still bad then I don't really know what to say, it's not like there's much one can do about youtube quality. :\

If that isn't a problem, you could try rendering your footage out into .wmv (if you haven't already) ... Youtube accepts both .mp4 and .wmv. I find wmv to be a lot better at uploading/converting then mp4 (but that's just my taste for YouTube). There won't be much of a difference, if not better than mp4 on YouTube, in quality. Though again this is my preference in codecs for Youtube.

Also for rendering in wmv I change

Video Settings;Video Smoothness to the sharpest it can go (100%),

Bit Rate;(Internet/LAN) to about 10 since I believe the default is about 6...

If you are rendering out in lossless avi and compressing into mp4 then it might be your options on Zarx264gui you have selected, or try other options just to see if something else works better.

Ignore this guy, WMV is a terrible idea. Incidentally, bitrate doesn't really matter in streaming, VBV buffering sizes and caches do. YouTube handles encoding your shit though so it doesn't really require you to mess around with VBV on your own, and nobody here with maybe the exception of mirko and zarx and ryuuchin actually knows how these work.

What codec does youtube even use to stream their videos? Lets say they use h264, if I encode to h264, shouldn't that mean they are speaking the same language? Im just curious as to how they would reduce quality if the source is the same.

The_TEKnician wrote:What codec does youtube even use to stream their videos? Lets say they use h264, if I encode to h264, shouldn't that mean they are speaking the same language? Im just curious as to how they would reduce quality if the source is the same.

You used to be able to encode your videos within certain parameters to avoid a re-encode. You could also hex edit files to trick YouTube in allowing higher quality videos. However, now they just re-encode everything regardless. There might be new tricks you can try, but it is always changing. Either find somewhere better to put streaming videos or just leave a link for a HQ download for those who care about quality.

YouTube re-encodes everything due to an issue with VBV sizing. Nothing you can do about it currently. They also use relatively low bitrate, and IIRC a somewhat old build of x264 with their own custom crap rolled in. Don't quote me on that though.